The giant information and entertainment screens in Tesla Inc.’s cars will be powered by new components from Intel Corp. after the automaker replaced chipi supplier Nvidia Corp. for that function, according to people familiar with its plans.

Tesla’s Model 3 and new versions of its other cars will get the new Intel processing modules, said the people, who asked not to be identified speaking about a private agreement. Nvidia and Intel declined to comment. Tesla declined to comment.

(the tremendous irony at the moment is that no one at INTC, NVDA, or TSLA will comment on the record.... however, NVDA opened on it's high today after positive news of the Chinese Cloud companies announcing yesterday that they would be using NVDA GPU's in their cloud computer's.... and then NVDA closed near it's low, while INTC has closed near it's high... editorial observation by JJP)

Cars are being made with more electronics inside, making the automotive market increasingly important for chipmakers. Nvidia’s stock has surged more than sixfold in the past two years, partly on its rising business with car makers. Most of the new revenue has come from the new dashboard systems that control entertainment and information for drivers.

Intel, the world’s largest chipmaker, is looking to lower its dependence on personal computers and persuade car makers they need its powerful processors to make vehicles capable of making more decisions for themselves. Intel doesn’t break out how much revenue it gets from that market. In its most recent quarter, Nvidia reported automotive sales of $142 million, about 6 percent of its total revenue.

Intel shares rose almost 1 percent to close at $37.47 in New York. Nvidia closed at $171.96, up 0.6 percent, after climbing as much as 4.5 percent earlier in the day.

While Tesla is still one of the smaller automakers -- it shipped just over 76,000 vehicles in its last financial year -- it’s been at the forefront of bringing new technology to the market.

The main prize for chipmakers will be providing the computing engine that allows cars to become fully autonomous. Those systems are still in development with automakers and chipmakers announcing test programs with multiple partners. Nvidia’s chips power Tesla’s Autopilot 2 system, which handles some driving situations.

Japanese internet and telecommunications giant SoftBank GroupCorp.9984 +0.26% is teaming up with a Saudi sovereign-wealth fund to create a multibillion-dollar technology-investment fund, in a partnership that combines deep pockets with one of the world’s most ambitious tech investors.

Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund may contribute an additional $45 billion over the next five years as the fund’s lead partner, SoftBank said. SoftBank said in a statement that the company was in talks with “a few large global investors” who could eventually push the new fund up to $100 billion to become the world’s “biggest investor” in technology over the next decade.

The ambitious plan lands as tech investors continue to plow record amounts of money into firms like Uber Technologies Inc., the world’s most valuable startup at $68 billion, despite soaring valuations that have led many to worry that the sector is overheating.

SoftBank has also been stepping up its deal pace, pouring more than $45 billion into technology investments alongside co-investors over the past two years and putting its overseas investment operations into a separate unit earlier this year. Recent investments include participation in a $4.5 billion fundraising round for Chinese ride-hailing champion Didi Chuxing Technology Co. and $1 billion into South Korea’s largest mobile commerce company Coupang.

The addition of the Public Investment Fund boosts SoftBank’s investment firepower. The fund is central to Saudi Arabia’s plan to diversify its economy beyond oil. The plunge in crude prices since 2014 has hurt the finances of the kingdom, which depends on oil income for more than two-thirds of government revenue. Last year, Saudi Arabia’s budget deficit was a record $98 billion, or 16% of gross domestic product.

“The PIF is preparing for the twilight of the oil,” said John Sfakianakis, a Riyadh-based economist with the Gulf Research Center. “They are looking for another success story like Alibaba.”

SoftBank said its head of strategic finance, Rajeev Misra, will head the new fund, and that it has engaged former Deutsche banker Nizar Al-Bassam and ex-Goldman partner Dalinc Ariburnu for the project.

Investment PivotSoftBank has been shifting investments to the tech sector from telecommunications.

Value of investmentsTop three acquisitions

*Year-to-dateSource: Dealogic

SoftBank, established in 1981 by Mr. Son, has a long history of investing in technology and telecommunications ventures. SoftBank was one of the earliest investors in Yahoo Corp. , a bet that proved hugely successful and which the company largely cashed out of by the early 2000s. SoftBank first invested in Alibaba in 2000, when it put $20 million into the then tiny e-commerce company. Since then, Alibaba has become China’s biggest internet shopping mall worth $249 billion, making it Mr. Son’s most successful bet.

During the past few years, Mr. Son has tried to give more order to SoftBank’s investment operations, separating its overseas investments including Sprint from its domestic mobile businesses and putting it under the leadership of former Google executive Nikesh Arora. Mr. Arora abruptly stepped down in June after facing a barrage of criticism from investors.

After Mr. Arora’s departure, Mr. Son has said he intends to invest in fields including smart robots, the “Internet of Things” and artificial intelligence—areas he has said would be a focus for his company over the next 30 years.

Mr. Son has pledged big bucks elsewhere too. Last year, SoftBank formed a joint venture with India’s Bharti Enterprises and Taiwan’s Foxconn Technology Group to invest about $20 billion in renewable energy in India, although it is unclear how far the project has advanced since its inception. Mr. Son has also said he wants to invest as much as $10 billion in Indian tech companies and around $4.5 billion in South Korea’s technology sector over the next decade.

(editorial comment by JJP.... the $100 Billion Dollars that the young Saudi King or minister of Finance .... (The entire country of Saudi Arbia is looking to Modernize rapidly as witnessed by them finally giving the right to female Saudi's to drive today for the first time in history shows how they are playing catch up with a more Western society sensibility. The Sovereign Wealth Fund of Saudi Arabia has been very actively deployed especially the $100 billion dollars they gave to Softbank to invest on their behalf..

They have sunk major 5 Billion dollar chunks into companies such as NVDA, and a number of other top tier US best of breed tech stocks this past year..... it has been an interesting episode to watch unfold. JJP)

Saudi Arabia and Japan’s SoftBank said they will create a technology investment fund that could grow as large as $100 billion, aiming to create one of the world’s largest private equity funds.

The plan is part of a series of dramatic business initiatives launched by Riyadh this year as Saudi Arabia, its economy hurt by low oil prices, deploys huge financial reserves in an effort to move into non-oil industries.

SoftBank’s founder and chairman Masayoshi Son, who has built his company into a $68 billion telecommunications and tech investment behemoth from a $50,000 start-up, has been seeking to expand in new areas.

The Public Investment Fund (PIF), Saudi Arabia’s top sovereign wealth fund, is set to be the lead investment partner and may invest up to $45 billion over the next five years while SoftBank expects to invest at least $25 billion, the Japanese company said in a statement.

Several other large investors are in talks on their possible participation and could bring the total size of the new fund up to $100 billion. The investors were not identified.(Ultimately the Saudi's contributed $100 billion themselves by the time this summer rolled around, I will look for documentation on that.... Several of my co workers spend a significant amount of time NVDA, machine learning, AI and all the ancillary areas.... so we have thick binders of research, 10Q filings... as well as the wealth of information that come off of the investor section of the NVDA website... the same thing can be said for several of these premier companies

GOOGL has the most incredible website.. the deeper you dig the more you find.. and the more you find the deeper you dig... and it never ever stays static and the same for long!!!!!

editorial note by JJP)

“With the establishment of the SoftBank Vision Fund, we will be able to step up investments in technology companies globally. Over the next decade, the SoftBank Vision Fund will be the biggest investor in the technology sector,” SoftBank Chairman Masayoshi Son said.

The fund would be managed in Britain by a subsidiary of SoftBank.

Investment powerSaudi Arabia’s Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, (THE Crown Prince is single handedly moving Saudi Arabia quantum leaps ahead in global investing and in modernizing and westernizing Saudi society) leading an economic reform drive in the kingdom, has revealed a string of high-profile investment plans this year.

He has said he aims to expand the PIF, founded in 1971 to finance development projects in the kingdom and until this year little known abroad, from $160 billion to about $2 trillion, making it the world’s largest sovereign fund.

In June, the PIF departed from Saudi Arabia’s traditional strategy of low-risk investments and took a step into the tech world by announcing the $3.5 billion purchase of a stake in U.S. ride-hailing firm Uber.

The deal illustrated how Riyadh now hopes to use its investments to develop the economy: Uber is a popular form of transport for Saudi women, who are banned from driving, and is creating badly needed non-oil jobs for Saudi citizens.

SoftBank’s tech and telecommunications portfolio ranges from U.S. carrier Sprint to a stake in Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba.

Its $32 billion purchase of British company ARM in July established its first major presence in chip making, driven by expectations for a shift to the so-called “internet of things” – networks of connected devices, vehicles and sensors.

Son said earlier this year that he wanted to “cement SoftBank 2.0” by working on unconventional ideas.

(Reporting by Andrew Torchia and Tom Wilson; Additional reporting by Sami Aboudi in Jerusalem, Ali Abdelatti in Cairo and William Maclean in Dubai; Editing by Edwina Gibbs)

Following its time with Ambarella Inc AMBA 7.08% management on a road show, Morgan Stanley raised the bull case for the company to $115, suggesting 152-percent upside. The optimistic expectation is based on the firm getting increasingly excited for computer vision.

As such, the firm has an Overweight rating for the shares of Ambarella, with the price target at $60.

In pre-market trading, shares of Amabrella were surging up 3.68 percent to $47.28.

Analysts Joseph Moore and Craig Hettenbach noted that the company is upbeat about a significant advancement in the state of the art for dedicated CV chips. If the actual product lives up to this potential, the analysts feel the narrative completely changes.

The analysts think this should pave the way for Ambarella to move to a socket-driven niche market company to a leader in a market that has recently emerged as a strategic priority for every company in semiconductors.

Computer Vision: Emerging Opportunity In Semiconductors CV is processing video images to extract information, with such video analytics key to several of the most important potential growth drivers in semiconductors, especially in driver assistance and eventually autonomous driving.

Morgan Stanley noted that they are also important in several aspects of consumer and industrial IoT, where camera inputs will be used to automate and remotely inform a wide variety of tasks. With software development moving from heuristic development to machine learning, the firm said recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence "deep learning" will accelerate these technologies.

The firm pointed out that there are only a few dedicated solutions for CV, notably Movidius, which was acquired by Intel in 2016 and Mobileye, acquired by Intel earlier this year. The firm also noted that Nvidia has introduced tailored driving-based solutions, although the chips are based off more general purpose Tegra X2 chips.

Though the firm said it is too early to pick winners, it sees several years of growth for all of these product categories in the vision area. The firm expects dedicated designs to provide the best performance per watt, but to lack the design flexibility of more general purpose approaches. That said, the firm believes dedicated solutions are likely to create significant opportunity.

Challenges Remain That said, Morgan Stanley referred to the possibility of a long path to CV revenue for Ambarella amid manageable challenges in the core business. Additionally, the firm thinks the stock has quickly discounted the machine vision opportunity.

"Automotive driver assistance/autonomy won't drive revenue for multiple years, but development relationships with Tier one suppliers could be announced in 2018 — it's not our base case, but if that happens, we see substantial upside," the firm said.

Many people in Silicon Valley believe in the Singularity—the day in our near future when computers will surpass humans in intelligence and kick off a feedback loop of unfathomable change.

When that day comes, Anthony Levandowski will be firmly on the side of the machines. In September 2015, the multi-millionaire engineer at the heart of the patent and trade secrets lawsuit between Uber and Waymo, Google’s self-driving car company, founded a religious organization called Way of the Future. Its purpose, according to previously unreported state filings, is nothing less than to “develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence.”...(more @ link)

- I've put Homo Deus on my booklist, which is really for tomorrow when I tire of the internet and start reading again. When movies and music are no longer cheap. I'm currently collecting books, mostly by classic great writers and philosophers. But only on the cheap.

I'm currently watching a 24 hour lecture series on Great Britain from the Tudors through the Stewarts. There is plenty of free video on the web now. You can watch lecture courses that would cost thousands at Harvard et al for free now. European history has been an obsession for some time for me since our world view formed primarily there, after the reformation and the enlightenment.

- Hippies

I didn't blame them necessarily, especially not the real hippies (as opposed to posers.) I was one of the real ones growing up 2 hours from Haight Asbury in Sacramento during the 60s. I just think its ironic that it turned out like it did.

What I meant was we were all obsessed with the future, Star Trek... the naive idea that our ideas would change the world into a near Star Trekian utopia. We failed to a large degree to change anything...

What it was was a modern enlightenment... it changed the world view of many... but not enough.

We didn't see AI and Genetic Engineering coming so soon and merging. So its ironic that many of the San Francisco people/hippies who created the personal computer industry, because they were utopian futurists, created a business that enabled and, I think, inevitably will lead to the end of the natural human race. People like Jobs, Wozniak, the Knoll brothers and Robert Abel who was a friend of mine:

But none the less I think we are toast... whether than is the natural evolution scenario after all is anyone's guess at this time.

For myself, I'm 64, just about to semi-retire and hopefully live in the woods doing what I want, as unaffected by coming technology as is possible. I don't think I'll manage to live until immortality comes... which is right after the bionic/AI merge.